The purpose of this invention is to provide a practical means of automating the manufacture of advanced composite laminates. Over the past seven to eight years there have been two basic approaches to this task. One was to lay the composite tape material directly on to the mold form or bonding tool with a complex multi-axis composite tape laying head. This approach requires a minimal amount of manual handling of the composite material. However, this approach has limited appeal in actual practice because:
(1) It inhibits the flexibility of the designers options to get optimum performance from the material by restricting the type designs which can be used with this approach;
(2) It does not permit inspection and tracibility of each ply going into the structure; and
(3) machine complexity required for controlled laydown on compound curves causes lower equipment reliability, slower laydown rates and high equipment and programming costs.
Another approach, noted in the prior art to be the more commonly used production approach, has been to lay the composite tape directly on a transparent mylar. The material can be layed down by hand or with some form of mechanized tape laying head. It is then manually trimmed and laid on the bonding tool. The principal advantage of this approach is that it overcomes the three drawbacks of the first approach but has the penalty of additional handling and manufacturing operations.
The system to be described by these Letters Patent is an automated handling system which integrates the necessary manufacturing processes into one machine.